


there is a crack in everything

by FloraStuart



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:36:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloraStuart/pseuds/FloraStuart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week ago he thought he'd be dead by now, or else back in prison for good; he hadn't much cared which.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is a crack in everything

**Author's Note:**

> Missing scene for 2.10 Burke's Seven. This was supposed to be for Caffrey-Burke day, but it didn't get finished in time. The title is from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem".

The back door swings open, releasing a startling flood of light. 

Peter’s shadow is a blurred shape in the kitchen doorway. He holds out a beer and Neal takes it.

Satchmo follows Peter outside, sniffs once around the edges of the light, nosing in the puddles left by a late afternoon rain. The night is quiet; only the hum of a TV through an open window up the street breaks the stillness hanging over the patio, like a breath too long held and finally released.

Mozzie is awake.

Summer crickets form an impromptu orchestra pit somewhere out of sight beneath the stoop; Neal can hear the buzz and plink of moths, flying into the bare bulb over the door and bouncing off the glass. He showed up on Peter’s doorstep still wired from confronting Larssen, rage and panic together humming just beneath his skin; he made it this far on adrenaline but now he’s crashing, hollowed out and scraped raw inside, pinned to the wicker chair by something beyond exhaustion. 

He lets his head fall back as the kitchen door bangs shut. The numbness of shock and fatigue flooding the empty places dulls and softens under the porch light, becoming a broad ocean swell of relief that lifts him, helpless, like a boat broken into driftwood finally carried to the shore.

Inside the sink is running; he hears the clatter of dishes through the open window. He’s afraid to let his eyes close but he doesn’t think he could stand, now, if he tried.

Mozzie is going to live.

His eyes are gritty and starting to blur; between the housetops and the neighbors’ trees faint stars waver, hazy and indistinct. Peter says nothing, settling into the chair beside him and taking a long pull from his own bottle. Waiting for Neal to speak, or only soaking up the silence.

Light leaks in a warm yellow stripe beneath the door, flares out from the bulb overhead, forming a soft pocket of peace holding back the night, as bright and delicate as a soap bubble. Neal has lost all sense of day and night over the last week; the hospital and the office both are a blur of bright fluorescents and long hours of caffeine-fueled desperation; he slept when he couldn’t hold his head up any longer, when Peter pulled the files out of his hands and draped a blanket over him where he sat. He can’t remember the last time he saw his bed.

The heat has broken, after too many days when the air felt too thick and heavy for his lungs to process; a brief rainstorm swept the streets a few hours ago; he can smell ozone and wet pavement and car exhaust. The bottle in his hands is cold and sweating condensation; the beer tastes like parties in high school, like the first time Ellen let him share hers, like a definition of home buried in a dark box somewhere he hasn’t touched in years. With a conscious effort he can hold his hands steady, picking carefully at the wet label.

But when his eyes close he can still see Larssen walking away, disappearing into the dark.

_I guess you’ll never know …_

He’d been _this_ close to calling out; he’d been this close to running after Larssen.

He lets out a slow breath, quiet and only a little shaky, but Peter’s head turns sharply and Neal can feel that _look_ again, the one Peter’s been giving him all week, weighted with compassion and fear for him in equal measures. Like he’d been expecting Neal to break but never imagined it would be this bad.

Satchmo nudges at his leg. When no immediate scritches are forthcoming, he flops down with a put-upon sigh, a warm weight on Neal’s feet.

“I’m all right,” Neal says, and he's only partly lying; he sees Peter’s mouth tighten, lips pressed together in a thin line.

When his eyes close there’s a roaring darkness lit only by a wall of flame. He can still see that plane burning, his whole world gutted and torn open in a single moment. The wound, when he pokes at it, bleeds as freely as ever; the pain isn’t any less, and the enormity of a future without Kate in it is still too much for his mind to grasp.

But tonight, for the first time in eight months, that darkness isn’t the only thing he can see.

Mozzie is awake.

He’d been withdrawn and confused and drugged out of his mind, and he’d spent a good five minutes trying to convince Neal that the monitors all around were recording his thoughts, but he opened his eyes and he looked at Neal and he spoke.

Mozzie is going to live. And for the first time in over a week Neal can breathe again.

Satchmo’s tail thumps once, twice against the concrete. Neal blinks several times and tells himself it’s the alcohol mixed with sleep deprivation giving halos to the streetlamps up the block.

He remembers the last night he spent at June’s; he remembers sitting outside on the balcony, cleaning and loading the gun the way Ellen showed him, looking out at that glittering skyline for what he’d thought would be the last time.

_There are more important things in life than a nice view._ It had been Peter’s voice, and Peter’s words, echoing in his mind that night. _Like having people in your life you care about …_

Like keeping faith with someone who kept faith with you when you had no one else.

A week ago he thought he’d be dead by now, or else back in prison for good; he hadn’t much cared which. He’d made his peace with both.

“You’re not letting her down,” Peter says, and Neal looks up, startled.

“They teach you mind-reading at Quantico?” He says it lightly, like Peter’s words aren’t a scalpel probing an infected wound.

“We’re gonna find this guy,” Peter says. “Whoever’s behind this.”

The words have all the weight of a promise. Where the light stops at the patio’s edge the neighbors’ hedges are soft grey against the black shadows of the houses; an oak branch arches, creaking, overhead to block all but a ribbon of charcoal velvet sky between dark roofs. 

A soft breeze stirs the drooping heads of the potted marigolds on the table; Satchmo’s head is a soft weight on top of his foot, breath warm and wet against his ankle.

“She was there.” He can close his eyes and see her face, behind glass blurred by the smudges of a thousand fingerprints, the memory of a thousand hands reaching for what can’t be touched, an intimate portrait of longing painted in streaks of dirt and grease. “Every week. For three and a half years.” He can feel cement walls closing around him, suffocating, despite the soft breeze against his face. He doesn’t look at Peter. “She was there when no one else was.”

He can smell the herbs in Elizabeth’s window boxes, fragrant thyme and basil, the sharp tang of rosemary from the squat terra cotta planter beside the door.

He doesn’t know how to say this, that for everything he owes Peter he owes her first. Peter gave him a chance to build a new life, but without Kate he knows he never would have survived long enough to take that chance. She’d been his only anchor, on the inside; he _can’t_ explain what that meant, not to someone who’s never done time.

He’s still here and he’s still free and Kate will never stare into the dark out here and wait for fireflies. She’ll never sit beside him here and watch the streetlights come on one by one, never listen as the neighbors drag wheeled trash cans out to the street, or watch the striped feral cat stalking the edges of the shadows.

“She didn’t hold on that long so you could throw your life away for her.”

Neal has no answer for that. He turns the bottle in his hands, peels away a strip of the label, drops the curl of wet paper on the table and stares at his knees. _She’d want you to move on,_ everyone keeps telling him. _She’d want you to be happy._ But knowing what she’d want him to do and being able to do it are two very different things.

A screen door rattles somewhere up the street and a dog barks. Satchmo’s head lifts, alert. Neal clenches one hand tight around the bottle and lets the other drop between his knees; he hears a soft snort, feels a cold nose and then a warm tongue against his palm.

Next door the hum of the air conditioning unit cuts off; the sudden silence wraps around him, startling and thick.

“I scared you,” he says at last, and it’s thin and quiet, testing the edges of memory like walking onto rotten ice, or tearing an open wound. They haven’t talked about what happened at the Russian museum; Neal has tried not to think about it, and with Moz barely alive he’s had other things on his mind.

“Yeah.” The answer comes in a huff of breath, a laugh with no humor behind it, a release of some nearly unbearable tension. It comes to Neal, suddenly, that Peter’s fear for him in all this has been as great as Neal’s fear for Mozzie; the realization stops all other thoughts for half a breath; it is a thing huge and incomprehensible, and Neal can’t quite wrap his head around it. Then Peter’s eyes soften; the next words are gentle and only a little bit hoarse. “Scared a lot of people. Including yourself, I think.”

“Yeah.” His mouth frames the word but he’s not sure any sound makes it out.

He doesn’t know how to say this, that in all the pain and doubt and grief there was one razor-bright moment of clarity, one moment between firing that first shot and pulling back the hammer for a second when _everything made sense_ ; one moment when all the world collapsed into a funnel, a clean straight line down the end of a gun sight, and he knew who he was and what it all meant and everything he had to do.

He tips his head back, stares up at the curved claw of a nearly-quarter moon tangled in the arching branches of the neighbor’s oak; the night is warm, but suddenly he’s shivering. “If you hadn’t been there -”

“We were there.” Peter cuts him off, quickly, like he doesn’t want to hear the end of that sentence any more than Neal wants to say it. “Neal.” And it’s soft and rough, it’s _look at me_ and his eyes are dark, holding Neal’s, urgent and searching. “ _We were there._ ”

The rest ( _we always will be_ ) is unsaid; Peter’s face shows no judgment at all, only compassion and fear and an overwhelming and terrible relief. Neal blinks several times, rapidly, and looks away.

A car rumbles slowly up the street, headlights sweeping the block and fading out of sight. The sink has stopped; he can turn his head and see clean dishes stacked upside down on the drainboard just inside the window.

He doesn’t know how to say this, that part of him is broken without her, fragile and dangerous as a mess of glass and shrapnel.

Peter’s voice is impossibly gentle: “No one’s asking you to forget her.”

Neal doesn’t answer; he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He can’t look behind him anymore tonight. And he can’t yet look ahead; without Kate the only future he sees is an aching emptiness.

He drains the last of the beer and stares at the empty bottle. A breeze steals across the patio, sending dry leaves skittering across the concrete; a branch creaks slowly overhead.

Here and now there’s a light under the crack in the door, the kitchen’s warmth spilling out into the night; the scent of thyme and basil reaches him from the flowerboxes under the window; there’s a dog warming his feet.

Mozzie is awake. And Peter’s eyes and his voice are a lifeline; maybe Peter can hold the pieces together until Neal can find some way to hold it together on his own.

It’s late, but he doesn’t think he can get up right now. Forget going home and going to bed; he’s not sure he can make it as far as the guest room or the couch. 

Mozzie is going to live. 

And for now Neal only wants to hold onto this; he wants to hold onto this moment, the light and the window boxes and the crickets under the stoop and Peter’s complete and silent acceptance; he wants to rest here for a while.


End file.
